Traffic engineering mainly refers to attempts made at improving traditional best effort routing to get better performance from the network while optimizing its resource allocation. Traffic engineering may also take into account Quality of Service (QoS) requirements.
On a different front, work has been initiated to develop the necessary framework for what is sometimes referred to as Next Generation Networks (NGN). NGN provides separation of transport functions, services and applications as well as support for several access technologies with different types of services. NGN is also designed to support end to end QoS constraints. NGN aims at using packet switched technology (whereas circuit switching is still commonly used at that level).
What NGN imposes in terms of traffic engineering is to accommodate much more diverse needs and characteristics. The existing multi-constraints routing mechanism, likewise, are not able to support the expected requirements while keeping a manageable level of complexity. Furthermore, the current traffic engineering solutions are focused on admission control and initial reservation setup, which leads to long term sub-optimization of network utilization.
The present invention targets the needs for a flexible yet manageable resource allocation mechanism that takes into account longer term network resource allocation.